If ever there was a great example of the march of technology rendering appliances cheaper, it has to be DVD players. Considering that it is not too many years ago that typical DVD players cost $1000 or more, today’s sub $50 price is incredible. Not only that but today’s cheap DVD players will play just about anything. Some of them would probably even play a wet beer coaster, provided they were round and fitted in the disk drawer. Well, maybe they’re not quite that capable but you get the idea.

Just recently, the cheapest-ever DVD player was a Tevion brand unit from Aldi stores priced at just $39! No doubt, there are even cheaper examples available on eBay. The question which must be asked is: just how do they do it? It must mean that the factory price is incredibly low. And it is not just one factory in Asia that is doing this – there are thousands of factories right throughout Asia.

Nor are these machines short on features. Not only will they play all sorts of disk formats, they usually also have a digital display, optical and digital outputs, Dolby 5.1 digital output and volume control via the infrared remote control.

But when you open these machines up, there is not much inside their very light and often quite flimsy chassis. You have the plastic disk player itself, the switchmode power supply and a small PC board carrying one large VLSI chip and otherwise packed with surface-mount devices. If one of these machines fails, it will not be worth getting it repaired – it will go straight to the tip. Even machines which fail during warranty won’t be repaired. Such repairs would cost far more than the retail value of the machine.

So what is the downside? Until recently, apart from the ever-growing heap of electronic junk going to the tip, we had not been aware of any downside. Then we became aware of the downside when I purchased that self-same Tevion machine to replace quite an old CD player that I had in my study. When I hooked it up to my equally venerable Harman Kardon AM/FM stereo receiver, I noted that the player sounded OK but certainly not like a really good CD player.

But when I switched across to the AM broadcast band while still leaving the DVD player on, I noticed that the entire AM broadcast band was blotted out. Hmm. There must be quite a lot of radiated hash, I thought. So I picked up a portable radio and yes, there was a great deal of interference. That was bad enough but then I switched across to FM and was staggered to find that the FM reception was blotted out as well.

In normal circumstances, blotting out FM reception is no easy feat. If you wanted to deliberately blot out all FM reception in a limited area, you would have to put out a very strong signal in order to overcome the "capture effect" of a standard FM tuner. But now we have a simple answer – just use a cheap DVD player and amplify the RF rubbish radiated by its audio outputs. This also makes nonsense of any EMC checks that may have been made on this player for C-tick or any other compliance testing

The rest of this story starts on page 10 of this issue and while our survey of DVD players is very limited, it does clearly demonstrate that you still get what you pay for. In other words, if you buy a cheap DVD player, don’t expect it to give you hifi quality sound. The same caution might also apply to the video performance of these cheap players although we are inclined to think that since they all tend to use a standard jungle chip inside them, they probably all give quite reasonable performance in that regard. However, we would not suggest that you spend a lot of money on an expensive plasma or LCD TV or an LCD video projector and then team it up with a cheap DVD player. That would be a waste of money!

Leo Simpson